by Lodge, Gytha
Victor gave him a prickly look. The young Brazilian did prickly pretty well. He had an intense, piercing gaze, and the kind of chiseled bone structure and dark beard that went well with his brooding expression. He looked strong, too. His lack of excess flesh made the veins and muscles stand out on his arms.
Eventually, in the face of Jonah’s bland expression, he nodded. Jonah rolled the tape.
“I’d like to ask you about the last time you saw Zoe,” he said. “When was that?”
“Wednesday,” he said. “Wednesday night.”
“Can you explain the circumstances?”
Victor shrugged. “We went for dinner at La Mejican. The four of us. Angeline, Maeve, Zoe, me.”
“Did you often go out together?” Hanson asked.
“Yes,” Victor said shortly. “We were friends.”
“And how did Zoe seem?” This question was Jonah’s.
“Same as always.”
“She wasn’t unhappy?” he persisted. “Didn’t seem like she might have been hiding something?”
There was a pause. Victor looked as though he were being forced to say something he disliked. “She rushed off at the end,” he said eventually. “She said she was tired, but I saw her read a message and then go. I thought maybe it was a man. I didn’t know she was back with Aidan Poole. It makes sense now.”
“You think she went to meet him?”
“Yes,” Victor said. “And I think that bastard killed her.”
“But this was the previous night,” Jonah said.
“I don’t mean then,” Victor said dismissively. “I mean that he was clearly back in her life and manipulating her, and I think he killed her.”
“It was Aidan Poole who raised the alarm.”
“So he killed her and then regretted it,” Victor said, his eyes full of anger. “He would regret it. She was the best thing in his life, and he never deserved her.”
Jonah considered his next words for a few moments. “You seem very keen to believe Aidan was responsible. How did you feel about Zoe yourself?”
“She was my friend,” Victor said tightly.
“And how did you react when you found out they were together?”
Victor’s head moved quickly, like a cat’s, as his gaze flew to Hanson and back again. “Someone told you I vandalized his computer, didn’t they? I didn’t do it on purpose. I knocked his coffee cup over because I was angry.”
“Angry because he was dating the woman you wanted?” Hanson asked, leaning forward.
“No,” Victor said aggressively. “He was…he was rude to me.”
Hanson gave a small smile. “Come on, Victor. I’ve worked barista jobs. Customers are rude to you on a daily basis. You deal with it. There was more going on, wasn’t there?”
Victor gave her a look of loathing that surprised Jonah. It was unusual for potential suspects to be so obviously antagonistic toward an officer.
Hanson, he was happy to note, kept on prodding. “You’d always liked Zoe, hadn’t you?” she said. “You hated Aidan because he was in your way. At what point did that hatred transfer itself onto Zoe?”
Victor shook his head. “I didn’t hate Zoe. Not ever. Not for a minute.” He fixed Hanson with a hard, angry stare. “She was only the victim of a manipulative man.” He suddenly glanced toward Jonah. “Who said that? About the coffee? It was Maeve, wasn’t it? Of course it fucking was.” He jabbed a finger into the table. “Maeve would say anything to make Aidan look better, even if it screwed over every other person on this planet. She’s obsessed with him.”
“What makes you say that?” Jonah asked evenly, more than interested that this was the conclusion Victor had jumped to when Maeve had in fact defended him.
Victor snorted. “Most of her behavior for the last year. She kept having little private chats with Aidan, apparently about Zoe. And she kept pressuring Zoe to stay with him, or get back together. All the time.” He looked disgusted.
“What would her motivation be for keeping them together?” Hanson asked.
“It meant she got to keep seeing him,” Victor said, as if it should have been obvious. The curled lip he directed at Hanson looked personal. “And she’s got issues, too. She won’t have sex before marriage, but she sure as hell liked to watch those two kissing. It’s like she got off on it.”
Jonah spent a few seconds both thinking this through and writing it down in short form. It was hard to know how to respond. He wondered whether he could believe this of Maeve Silver. “Do you think she could have wanted to hurt Zoe herself?”
“I don’t know,” Victor said, suddenly looking away with a shrug. The anger seemed to step down dramatically now that he was no longer under direct pressure. “I guess not. But if she knew Aidan had done it, I think she’d do anything she could to cover it up.”
* * *
—
JONAH SPENT SEVERAL minutes sitting in his office after Victor had gone, trying to decide what he thought of the Brazilian’s accusations. On one level it seemed like childish mudslinging in the face of a few harsh comments. On another it chimed with Maeve’s embarrassment when he’d asked if Aidan had hit on her.
He wasn’t too worried by the suggestion that Maeve might be covering up for Aidan. There was too much pointing toward Aidan Poole being at home. They had more CCTV footage to scroll through, but he doubted that Aidan was going to appear on it, and he doubted still further that their man in a cap was him. It would have made no sense at all to call emergency services to a crime and bring attention to it if he had been anywhere near Zoe’s flat at the time.
It still remained possible, Jonah thought, that Maeve had been wound up by Aidan to do something while he remained at a safe distance. It was also possible that she had acted on her own. When Zoe and Aidan had broken up, she might have believed it was her turn. It was even possible that Aidan had encouraged that. And if so, finding out later that Zoe had taken Aidan back might have driven her to violence.
And then there was Victor’s own obsession with Zoe to think about. He wasn’t sure how well Victor’s volatile personality sat with a carefully plotted crime, but it was possible that long-term, burning anger could create cold planning instead of hot rage.
The other thing he’d gotten no further with was mapping Zoe’s movements on the Thursday. Aside from Angeline seeing her in the morning and Felix’s call, they had nothing definite. Nothing until Felix apparently saw her return home around eight-thirty, which, if true, meant that she’d left her flat at some point.
Meanwhile, Victor had suggested that Zoe was meeting up with someone Wednesday night, but that she’d kept hidden who it was. A fact that hadn’t come to light in anyone else’s statements. If she’d left the flat Thursday, it might have been in order to meet up with the same person.
Lightman tapped on Jonah’s door a few minutes into his reverie. “I’ve got some more movements on CCTV that I think might be interesting.”
Jonah followed him and drew up one of the many vacant chairs. Lightman clicked to expand one of several snapshots he’d saved. The frozen image showed a view through an arch, and Jonah knew it must be from the camera positioned in the car park behind the flats. “This is five-twenty on Thursday,” Lightman said. “The camera is farther down Hill Lane, so that’s close to the center of town.”
He hit the Play button, and Jonah watched as a car appeared and disappeared along the road, heading toward town, followed by a punky-looking woman in a leather jacket and glasses. And then another figure did the same. They were hurrying, hands shoved in jacket pockets and legs moving quickly as they passed across the archway.
Lightman paused the film just before the figure left the screen. It was clear from this frozen frame that the figure was Zoe, her hair pulled up into a bun as it had been when she’d died.
Jonah felt a shiver run up his back. It w
as always unsettling to watch the dead on camera. “And we’ve picked her up returning home, too,” Lightman said.
He loaded up another clip, taken from the camera near the block of flats. The time read 8:31. More than three hours after Zoe had left her flat, and almost exactly when Felix had said he’d seen her return.
After a moment or two, Zoe appeared in the frame. She was walking more slowly this time, her right hand going for her pocket, where presumably her key was. But she slowed down and then stopped before she got to the door, and by her movements it was obvious that she was talking to someone out of the shot. Someone who was presumably standing right next to the front door, and had been waiting for her.
“Do we get to see them?” he asked.
“Unfortunately not,” Lightman said.
The conversation went on for a few minutes, and then Zoe half moved forward, hesitated, and then went off-screen toward the front door. She didn’t reemerge.
“Felix Solomon’s flat,” Jonah said thoughtfully. “Which side is it?”
“Juliette has it marked down as this end of the building,” Lightman said, gesturing to the right-hand side. “Looking out onto the road.”
“So he probably wouldn’t have seen someone waiting by the door,” Jonah said. “He claims only to have seen Zoe. The time is right, too. Though there’s a chance, I suppose, that he was actually the one waiting there.”
He watched it again, taking in Zoe’s attitude. The faltering steps. The distance between her and whoever had been waiting for her. The way she stood back on her heels. The way she fidgeted right and left.
“Is it just me,” he asked, “or does she look frightened?”
September—fourteen months before
A quarter of an hour before the Michaelmas exhibition opened, Zoe realized that she was actually quite drunk. The pre-drinks had not been a good idea, not when they had started at five and she’d had almost nothing to eat for lunch. She needed water, but there was only Prosecco on offer on the table near the hall. It was meant for the guests anyway.
She made her slightly unsteady way to the bathroom, trying to smile at her tutor on her way past. Thankfully Annette was clearly preoccupied with an issue over some fabric on a display and gave her only a vague smile in return.
Zoe let herself into the loos and leaned heavily against the sink, hands flat on the wet marble counter. She took a few breaths and then ran the tap and scooped up mouthful after mouthful of water. She was drenching her clingy white dress and its single draping sleeve, but she couldn’t summon enough energy to worry about it right now.
It was several minutes before she felt like she’d watered down the alcohol enough, even if the effects were going to take a while to kick in. She straightened up and had to try hard to focus on her reflection, which showed an imperfect version of herself. Her dress was blotched with grayish wet patches, and some of the white-and-purple makeup around her left eye had dribbled down her cheek and then dried there. It must have been like that for ages.
She pulled some of the paper towel out of its holder hastily, and wet it a little. She rubbed off the makeup as much as possible and then pulled her dark-brown eyeliner and glittering purple paint out of her bag. She could at least cover it up.
You shouldn’t have got drunk, she told herself. Why did you get drunk?
But she knew why. She was so much thinner than she used to be; and she hadn’t had the food in her system to help her.
Being thinner was a good thing, of course. A conscious choice. It wasn’t the same as Angeline and her obsessive control over food. Zoe had just decided she needed to feel better about herself, a month after she’d found out that Aidan was still technically married.
It had happened after Aidan had casually mentioned how he’d been bowled over by Greta’s beauty when he first met her. Zoe, halfway through another expensive dinner, had felt absolutely sick.
She’d taken Aidan back to her house as usual afterward, but had found herself unable to sleep. At one-fifteen she’d crept downstairs with her phone, taking care not to step on any of the noisy floorboards on the first-floor landing. Maeve wasn’t the heaviest sleeper.
She’d looked up Greta Poole for the first time, half hating herself for doing it. The series of professional photographs she’d immediately uncovered on Google Images had horrified her. She shouldn’t have been surprised that Aidan’s wife—ex-wife, nearly—was beautiful. He was an attractive man, and it made sense for him to be with someone gorgeous. It had been wishful thinking on Zoe’s part to imagine Greta as a frumpy creature. That he no longer loved her because he’d realized he could do better. But it had been such a comforting illusion.
The worst part of staring at photo after photo was probably not the inadequacy. It was the mean-spiritedness of the feeling. She’d never been the sort of person who resented other women. But then she’d never been in a relationship with a man who was still extricating himself from a marriage.
She’d also never been particularly into dieting, but some strange switch had been flicked in her head as she sat there in the darkened sitting room, the phone screen the only bright point. From then on, it had been easy to say no. To take food out of the fridge, and then put it back, uneaten. It had almost become satisfying.
Now, four months later, she was almost two stone lighter. Her once-round face was all angles and planes, and she’d had to replace most of her clothes with smaller ones. Tighter ones. Like tonight’s asymmetrical white dress, which clung to her.
Despite her new, thinner figure, and the admiration it seemed to inspire in everyone else, the inadequacy was still there. Her glamorous reflection didn’t make her feel any better. She wondered how much thinner she’d need to get. How much weight loss would it take to stop feeling threatened by the gorgeous woman Aidan had lived with for most of his life? The woman he still cohabited with, even if he slept in a separate room.
She wished Aidan would move out now. That he’d stop waiting for the divorce papers. In truth, she wished he’d move in with her. It was what he wanted. He’d said so. But he’d made no firm plans.
Alone in that bathroom, with damp palms and makeup that just wouldn’t go right, Zoe had a sick worry that he didn’t really care. Tonight meant so much, and he wasn’t here. When she really, really wanted him to be here for her, he’d put his work first.
She had almost asked him, when he’d told her that he couldn’t get out of this conference, whether she really was the woman of his dreams or was, in fact, just an ego boost to get him through his divorce. But then he’d told her he was going to take her away for her birthday, to somewhere hot and secluded and wonderful, and she’d felt guilty for even having the thought. He did so much for her. Of course he loved her.
But it had still been hard, watching her prize-winning painting go up and knowing that he wouldn’t be there to see it with her or to hear her talk about it. All the others would be here. Angeline and Victor and Maeve. Even her lovely boss, Gina.
Zoe stopped trying to correct her makeup and rinsed her hands. She told herself to be grateful for her friends, and then she walked back outside with a very determined smile.
* * *
—
ZOE WAS ALMOST sober by the time she arrived back at the house with Maeve. With the sobering up came a feeling of profound tiredness, and she’d persuaded Maeve to leave early with her.
She checked her phone every few minutes in the taxi home, and wondered if she could get away with calling Aidan. But it was only nine, and he was likely to be at the dinner. She couldn’t stand the idea of being the needy girlfriend who interrupted his work time, so she eventually put her phone away in her bag.
She felt strangely flat after what should have been a wonderful evening. After what had been wonderful, even if Victor had predictably gone off in a strop at one point, and even if Felix had looked ill. She’d been startled to see
him pale and shaking; startled partly by the aging effect it had had on him.
The rest of the night had been a series of congratulatory conversations where she’d blushed and smiled and accepted the compliments. She’d enjoyed it. Of course she’d enjoyed it. But she was profoundly glad to step out of the taxi onto the pavement outside the house.
She let them both in while Maeve hunted furiously in her oversized bag for her keys. She was checking her phone yet again as she walked into the sitting room and was therefore slow to see the incredible creation on the kitchen table.
There were flowers, dozens of them. They were clutched in a box with extravagant ruffles of plastic and ribbon and tissue paper. All of them were white or pink, like some hugely oversized wedding bouquet. Lilies so large they looked like triffids, and great heavy peonies and spiky irises between them, with sprays of leaves and gold twigs.
“Ah,” Maeve said, behind her, and sneezed twice. “Sorry. They came after you left. I figured I should leave it as a surprise. You might have to keep them in your room. My nose hates them.”
Zoe approached the table with none of her earlier doubts. She couldn’t help grinning as she plucked a gold envelope from amid the sprays and opened it. The card inside said “Congratulations” in gold, and inside, stuck in on a printed label, she read:
To the most talented woman I’ve ever met. I’m so proud that you are mine, and I can’t wait to celebrate in person. Your Aidan xxx
She handed the card to Maeve, who read it with a raised eyebrow. “He’s all right, that man of yours, isn’t he?”
“Yes,” Zoe said, smiling stupidly. “He’s not bad.”
It was now a wet Saturday afternoon in an empty station, but the whole team was still working away. Hanson had viewed the CCTV footage of their suspicious character in a cap and Zoe’s conversation with an unseen person. She had then announced firmly that she wanted to check the other camera for whomever Zoe had been talking to.
